Detail: The Taipei Fine Arts Museum announces
Esther Lu as curator and Chia-Wei Hsu,
Bernd Behr, and Katerina Šedá as
featured artists for the Taiwan Pavilion
at the 55th Venice Biennale of Art.
States curator Esther Lu, "This project
resonates with the context of the
historical circumstances and current
conditions of the Taiwan Pavilion's
participation in the Venice Biennale.
Parallel artistic and curatorial
narratives will explore and engage with
questions of subjectification to
conceive of the Pavilion not only as an
exhibition space, but also as a concept
evolving on a temporal axis in order to
illuminate the formation of cultural
subjectivity." The exhibition concept
thus outgrows the boundaries of
representation for a de facto or
imagined pavilion. Departing from
investigations and deconstructions of
narrative, historiography, and identity,
the curatorial remit foregrounds the
agency of art alongside functions of
imagination in a way that corresponds
with the 2013 Venice Biennale theme of
"The Encyclopedic Palace."
Chia-Wei Hsu (b. 1983, Taiwan) lives and
works in Taipei. Hsu graduated from the
Graduate School of Plastic Art, National
Taiwan University of Arts. His artistic
practice investigates the subject of
imagery and narrative through video
installation to expose contemporary
mechanisms of spectacle production while
addressing memory, imagination,
identity, and other cultural connections
to filming sites. The juxtaposition of
performance and event in the narratives
of video and installation creates a
wormhole, weaving together reality and
imagination.
Bernd Behr (b. 1976, Taiwan/ Germany) is
based in London. Born in Hamburg,
Germany, and raised in Malaysia, Behr
studied at Goldsmiths College, London.
Working across video,
photography,sculpture, and writing, his
practice operates a speculative
archaeology at the historical junctures
of images, narratives and the built
environment. Often engaging with
specific architectural sites and their
associative histories, his work inserts
itself into these subjects through modes
of research and fiction.
Katerina Šedá (b. 1977, Czech Republic)
lives and works in Brno, Czech Republic.
Šedá's work often engages a community to
explore subjects of relationships,
cultural identity, and daily politics in
an urban setting. Through creating
social games and social sculpture, she
invites individuals from a local
community to participate in a process to
resolve real, shared issues. When this
process becomes a switching point to
overturn reality and inspire new
perceptions, the participatory
experience becomes a process of
subjectification: a new reality is born
from a game. Šedá's practice sheds light
on humanity and a better common
tomorrow.
Commissioned curator Esther Lu (b. 1977)
is a Taiwanese freelance curator based
in Taipei. Lu studied literature and art
history, and completed an MA at
Goldsmiths College and curatorial
studies in CuratorLab, Konstfack
University. She is interested in
exploring practices to mobilize
connections and conversations inside and
outside of institutions. Her conceptual
experiments often address the agency of
art and initiate alternative artistic
productions in between social scenes in
reality and platforms of art in order to
investigate the critical role of art
today.